WORKSHOPS

Day 2 – Sep 10, 2014

Full Day
9:00 - 5:30 PM

In this workshop, you and your team will redesign an existing website to be more elegant, more usable, easier to maintain…and responsive.
view more…

In this workshop, you and your team will redesign an existing website to be more elegant, more usable, easier to maintain…and responsive. All in a day’s work(shop). Sophia will be your guide, but you will make it happen.

This is not a workshop on UX theory or technical execution. These realms are well covered in other workshops and the internet. Instead we will focus on the UX side of Getting Things Done. How do we UXers execute on our responsibilities in a RWD world? We will discuss efficiency, simplicity, prioritization, smart iteration and, Sophia’s personal favorite, modular design.

Pre-Req: You should know the basic concepts behind responsive design. If you are not familiar with RWD, spend an hour or two with Google and you should be up to speed.

Software: In conjunction with paper, pen and the requisite tower of sticky-notes, we will be using mind-mapping and prototyping software. Sophia will be demoing in Mindmeister and Axure, but any similar tools will work. Your mind-mapping tool just needs to have some rich text editing, and your prototyping tool needs the ability to create easily reusable "master" objects. So bring your laptops and your power cords.

(FYI: Mindmeister has a free basic account and Axure has a free 30 day trial.)

Touchscreens are everywhere now, even the desktop, and this workshop tells you what you need to know to make the most of them.
view more…

Touchscreens are everywhere now, even the desktop, and this workshop tells you what you need to know to make the most of them. Fingers and thumbs turn desktop design conventions on their head, with the ergonomics of handheld devices demanding entirely new design patterns for both web and apps. Handheld touchscreen design introduces ergonomic concerns that are new to many digital designers; it's no longer just how your pixels look but also how they feel. At the same time, touch gestures have the opportunity to sweep away away buttons, menus and windows from mobile devices, but gesture design takes care and education. Find out how to do it the right way. This workshop takes a hands-on approach to touchscreen design with practical guidelines, rich examples, exercises, and a bunch of new rules that bust the "settled" conventions of the desktop.

You'll learn:

Layout and sizing guidelines for touchscreens on phones and tablets...and desktop, too

Emerging gesture conventions and design patterns for both apps and web

How to make gestures discoverable by educating users with contextual cues

Techniques for making touch interactions fast and efficient

How to cope with the reduced real estate left in the wake of giant touch targets

When the best touch UI is no touch at all; how to use sensors to speed or replace touch input

Opportunities to push frontiers with entirely new interactions through touch

This full-day, hands-on workshop introduces UX and IxD practitioners (and their clients) a chance to expand their methodological toolbox with service design blueprinting—a powerful approach for designing and developing multi-channel experiences.
view more…

This full-day, hands-on workshop introduces UX and IxD practitioners (and their clients) a chance to expand their methodological toolbox with service design blueprinting—a powerful approach for designing and developing multi-channel experiences. If you have done your insights research and developed customer journeys, service blueprinting will help you align those desired journeys with the multiple delivery channels, touchpoints, backstage services and business goals required to deliver them. Blueprints have a simple structure, but many possibilities. They can be used for analysis, ideation, mapping and measurement and can expanded or connected to other documents, such as design speciﬁcations or the business model canvas.

Grouped into small teams, you will develop a service from initial concept and expand it across the service ecosystem using the blueprint as a scaffold for your ideas. Working from detail to big picture and back again, these ideas will be developed into a coherent service proposition. Each group will end the day producing a sketched storyboard scenario and pitch of the service in action.

As services become more interconnected across channels and devices—and more importantly across time and space—it’s becoming increasingly important to find ways to gain insight about customers’ interactions with your product or service.
view more…

As services become more interconnected across channels and devices—and more importantly across time and space—it’s becoming increasingly important to find ways to gain insight about customers’ interactions with your product or service. We’ll focus on the power and peril of the touchpoint—where customers connect with your product or service, and we’ll show how to map the customer journey across touchpoints and channels. We’ll explore how every occasion where your organization touches or connects with a person’s life is appropriate, relevant, meaningful, and endearing.

Learn how to examine the full view of your users’ journey and draw a blueprint of those interactions at this full day workshop. Learn the characteristics of touchpoints so you can define them for your organization.

Day 2 – Sep 10, 2014

Morning
9:00 - 12:30 PM

For many UX designers, what developers do tends to be of a black box.
view more…

For many UX designers, what developers do tends to be of a black box. You collaborate with them on figuring out a design and then they go off and do...something. Maybe you have a general idea of how developers work, but unless you actually are a developer, that’s usually about it.

In this session, we’ll uncover some of the costs in not understanding developer practices generally and their perspective on UX design specifically. Then, through a number of activities, we’ll explore three development practices from which UX designers can benefit greatly: Writing Pseudo Code, Test-Driven Development, and taking a developer-centered approach to designing Minimum Viable Products.

Time allowing, we’ll also touch on other common development practices UX designers can benefit from understanding, including Pair Programming, Refactoring and Continuous Integration.

After having completed this session, you’ll have an improved understanding of how developers think about and approach UX design, and be able to leverage that understanding toward a more effective UX practice.

Storyboarding converts the brainstorming whirlwind of notes into a real product direction, and in turn provides a vision that your team can return to throughout the design and development process.
view more…

Storyboarding converts the brainstorming whirlwind of notes into a real product direction, and in turn provides a vision that your team can return to throughout the design and development process. In this workshop you’ll how to put your ideas in the context of user needs through storyboarding.

Exploring product ideas with stories bridges silos between your teams and gets you communicating by using collaborative methods to define product direction. By crafting a story together, every member of your team is focused on building a single, cohesive product. You’ll learn about the components of an excellent storyboard and how those elements impact interface design.

Persuade your managers and clients to champion user-centered products by channeling the power of stories. From childhood we’re wired to remember and think in story structure. In this workshop you’ll get examples of how to harness this ingrained skill by presenting your product concepts in the form of stories and storyboards.

Destroy zombie ideas, the ones without a brain or beating heart. Zombies eat resources and sap your team’s time, energy, and commitment. Your storyboards will drive a product’s structure and flow, saving time by focusing on ideas that provide value to your users.

Join Sunni Brown for a hands-on, interactive experience designed to unlock your native capacity to create and apply visual language for better thinking and faster problem-solving. Based on a book featured in The New York Times, Fast Company and Oprah called The Doodle Revolution, this session will take you all the way from the basics of visual language to a more sophisticated form of applied visual thinking. Use infodoodling to tackle messy challenges, get relevant insights without serious heavy lifting, and whistle while we do the "work" together. Non-artists are not only welcomed but will probably get a hug for showing up.

What's in it for you:

Liberating and instinctive visual tools to elevate cognitive performance (with the science to back it up!)

Mobile iteration is notoriously tough. Development costs and timeframes far exceed those of web products and talented mobile developers and designers are expensive and difficult to recruit. The statistics suggest that even after launch, most companies in mobile don't succeed: 22% of mobile apps are opened just once and never used again while nearly 70% of users typically churn off an app within the first month.

Learn how to avoid a similar fate by addressing key market, product, and user risks early on through effective prototyping and rapid iteration. This interactive workshop will cover a wide range of successful and unsuccessful prototyping case studies in order to help you Identify the core elements of an effective prototype and apply practical strategies to your own work to maximize your chance of success.

You’re not a graphic designer, and you probably won’t switch careers after this workshop.
view more…

You’re not a graphic designer, and you probably won’t switch careers after this workshop. But you make decks, resumes, and other things, and you’d love to have more basic design knowledge at your disposal when you do.

You’re not a graphic designer, but you work with them on projects, and you’d like some insight into improving your collaboration, communication, and results.

You’re not a graphic designer, but you want to learn a bit more about design history and typography, and to engage in some hands-on, analog fun.

In this workshop, we’ll take a whirlwind tour through some highlights of design history, and cover basics of typography and composition. You’ll learn important dos & don’ts, along with a few obscure facts you can use at parties.

We’ll also discuss successful design collaboration, how to most usefully evaluate design work, and how to engage in constructive critique.

As we go, we’ll engage in a series of hands-on, analog exercises to practice the above concepts and unlimber your creativity.

Day 2 – Sep 10, 2014

Afternoon
2:00 - 5:30 PM

If you want to learn how to break the wireframe cycle and improve your design work, join us as we dive into why and when you should incorporate more pen sketching into your design process.
view more…

If you want to learn how to break the wireframe cycle and improve your design work, join us as we dive into why and when you should incorporate more pen sketching into your design process. You’ll also learn why and how to break down silos that often exist between website content owners, designers, engineers and business stakeholders and take home 9 practical tips you can apply to your work the next day. This unique format of presentations and a hands-on Design Studio workshop will be co-run by two web pros from 29th Drive: Kevin Goldman, Chief Design Architect and Jen Walsh, Senior UX Designer.

We'll touch on each of the following:

Honest design vs decoration

Why sketching is important to the design process

Tips & tricks to get you started with pen sketching

How to easily and effectively sketch remotely with team members, customers, and peers

In this hands-on workshop, we’ll discuss insights and techniques for building a nimble, effective and user-centred product team—a team that designs and builds great products for a global audience.
view more…

In this hands-on workshop, we’ll discuss insights and techniques for building a nimble, effective and user-centred product team—a team that designs and builds great products for a global audience. We’ll take you behind the scenes at Optimal Workshop to discuss what a Minimal Viable Product really is, and—the hard part—what to do once you’ve got one.

I’ll take you through our design and development process and how we ensure that our Better Experience Bureau is an integral part of this process. We’ll discuss the importance of design in every aspect of the work you do, and how the subtleties of user experience can make or break a business from the inside or out.

We’ve pulled together concepts from the Lean Startup movement, Agile UX, and waterfall methodologies to give you a grab-bag of tools to take with you back to your teams. And we’ll give you some tips on how to communicate your ideas clearly.

When we say ‘hands-on’, we mean it. You’ll get time to brainstorm and discuss how these insights could help you achieve your own particular goals, and solve your own unique challenges. And we'll encourage everyone to share their own insights as well.

Most UX designers use a combination of data and expertise to create their designs but don’t explicitly tie their design decisions to the evidence that created them.
view more…

Most UX designers use a combination of data and expertise to create their designs but don’t explicitly tie their design decisions to the evidence that created them. This can create a gap for stakeholders to understand the design strategy and create more churn in the design process. Instead, learn to be proactive with your design decisions and map them to quantitative and qualitative data. This workshop will teach you, through practice projects and discussion, how to articulate the “why” of your design based on objectively collected data. When you are able to reference credible data as evidence behind your design choices, the results are good for all: Better buy-in and understanding with your client, AND a stronger end product.

Day 3 – Sep 11, 2014

Full Day
9:00 - 5:30 PM

In this workshop, you and your team will redesign an existing website to be more elegant, more usable, easier to maintain…and responsive.
view more…

In this workshop, you and your team will redesign an existing website to be more elegant, more usable, easier to maintain…and responsive. All in a day’s work(shop). Sophia will be your guide, but you will make it happen.

This is not a workshop on UX theory or technical execution. These realms are well covered in other workshops and the internet. Instead we will focus on the UX side of Getting Things Done. How do we UXers execute on our responsibilities in a RWD world? We will discuss efficiency, simplicity, prioritization, smart iteration and, Sophia’s personal favorite, modular design.

Pre-Req: You should know the basic concepts behind responsive design. If you are not familiar with RWD, spend an hour or two with Google and you should be up to speed.

Software: In conjunction with paper, pen and the requisite tower of sticky-notes, we will be using mind-mapping and prototyping software. Sophia will be demoing in Mindmeister and Axure, but any similar tools will work. Your mind-mapping tool just needs to have some rich text editing, and your prototyping tool needs the ability to create easily reusable "master" objects. So bring your laptops and your power cords.

(FYI: Mindmeister has a free basic account and Axure has a free 30 day trial.)

Touchscreens are everywhere now, even the desktop, and this workshop tells you what you need to know to make the most of them.
view more…

Touchscreens are everywhere now, even the desktop, and this workshop tells you what you need to know to make the most of them. Fingers and thumbs turn desktop design conventions on their head, with the ergonomics of handheld devices demanding entirely new design patterns for both web and apps. Handheld touchscreen design introduces ergonomic concerns that are new to many digital designers; it's no longer just how your pixels look but also how they feel. At the same time, touch gestures have the opportunity to sweep away away buttons, menus and windows from mobile devices, but gesture design takes care and education. Find out how to do it the right way. This workshop takes a hands-on approach to touchscreen design with practical guidelines, rich examples, exercises, and a bunch of new rules that bust the "settled" conventions of the desktop.

You'll learn:

Layout and sizing guidelines for touchscreens on phones and tablets...and desktop, too

Emerging gesture conventions and design patterns for both apps and web

How to make gestures discoverable by educating users with contextual cues

Techniques for making touch interactions fast and efficient

How to cope with the reduced real estate left in the wake of giant touch targets

When the best touch UI is no touch at all; how to use sensors to speed or replace touch input

Opportunities to push frontiers with entirely new interactions through touch

This full-day, hands-on workshop introduces UX and IxD practitioners (and their clients) a chance to expand their methodological toolbox with service design blueprinting—a powerful approach for designing and developing multi-channel experiences.
view more…

This full-day, hands-on workshop introduces UX and IxD practitioners (and their clients) a chance to expand their methodological toolbox with service design blueprinting—a powerful approach for designing and developing multi-channel experiences. If you have done your insights research and developed customer journeys, service blueprinting will help you align those desired journeys with the multiple delivery channels, touchpoints, backstage services and business goals required to deliver them. Blueprints have a simple structure, but many possibilities. They can be used for analysis, ideation, mapping and measurement and can expanded or connected to other documents, such as design speciﬁcations or the business model canvas.

Grouped into small teams, you will develop a service from initial concept and expand it across the service ecosystem using the blueprint as a scaffold for your ideas. Working from detail to big picture and back again, these ideas will be developed into a coherent service proposition. Each group will end the day producing a sketched storyboard scenario and pitch of the service in action.

As services become more interconnected across channels and devices—and more importantly across time and space—it’s becoming increasingly important to find ways to gain insight about customers’ interactions with your product or service.
view more…

As services become more interconnected across channels and devices—and more importantly across time and space—it’s becoming increasingly important to find ways to gain insight about customers’ interactions with your product or service. We’ll focus on the power and peril of the touchpoint—where customers connect with your product or service, and we’ll show how to map the customer journey across touchpoints and channels. We’ll explore how every occasion where your organization touches or connects with a person’s life is appropriate, relevant, meaningful, and endearing.

Learn how to examine the full view of your users’ journey and draw a blueprint of those interactions at this full day workshop. Learn the characteristics of touchpoints so you can define them for your organization.

Day 3 – Sep 11, 2014

Morning
9:00 - 12:30 PM

For many UX designers, what developers do tends to be of a black box.
view more…

For many UX designers, what developers do tends to be of a black box. You collaborate with them on figuring out a design and then they go off and do...something. Maybe you have a general idea of how developers work, but unless you actually are a developer, that’s usually about it.

In this session, we’ll uncover some of the costs in not understanding developer practices generally and their perspective on UX design specifically. Then, through a number of activities, we’ll explore three development practices from which UX designers can benefit greatly: Writing Pseudo Code, Test-Driven Development, and taking a developer-centered approach to designing Minimum Viable Products.

Time allowing, we’ll also touch on other common development practices UX designers can benefit from understanding, including Pair Programming, Refactoring and Continuous Integration.

After having completed this session, you’ll have an improved understanding of how developers think about and approach UX design, and be able to leverage that understanding toward a more effective UX practice.

Storyboarding converts the brainstorming whirlwind of notes into a real product direction, and in turn provides a vision that your team can return to throughout the design and development process.
view more…

Storyboarding converts the brainstorming whirlwind of notes into a real product direction, and in turn provides a vision that your team can return to throughout the design and development process. In this workshop you’ll how to put your ideas in the context of user needs through storyboarding.

Exploring product ideas with stories bridges silos between your teams and gets you communicating by using collaborative methods to define product direction. By crafting a story together, every member of your team is focused on building a single, cohesive product. You’ll learn about the components of an excellent storyboard and how those elements impact interface design.

Persuade your managers and clients to champion user-centered products by channeling the power of stories. From childhood we’re wired to remember and think in story structure. In this workshop you’ll get examples of how to harness this ingrained skill by presenting your product concepts in the form of stories and storyboards.

Destroy zombie ideas, the ones without a brain or beating heart. Zombies eat resources and sap your team’s time, energy, and commitment. Your storyboards will drive a product’s structure and flow, saving time by focusing on ideas that provide value to your users.

Join Sunni Brown for a hands-on, interactive experience designed to unlock your native capacity to create and apply visual language for better thinking and faster problem-solving. Based on a book featured in The New York Times, Fast Company and Oprah called The Doodle Revolution, this session will take you all the way from the basics of visual language to a more sophisticated form of applied visual thinking. Use infodoodling to tackle messy challenges, get relevant insights without serious heavy lifting, and whistle while we do the "work" together. Non-artists are not only welcomed but will probably get a hug for showing up.

What's in it for you:

Liberating and instinctive visual tools to elevate cognitive performance (with the science to back it up!)

Mobile iteration is notoriously tough. Development costs and timeframes far exceed those of web products and talented mobile developers and designers are expensive and difficult to recruit. The statistics suggest that even after launch, most companies in mobile don't succeed: 22% of mobile apps are opened just once and never used again while nearly 70% of users typically churn off an app within the first month.

Learn how to avoid a similar fate by addressing key market, product, and user risks early on through effective prototyping and rapid iteration. This interactive workshop will cover a wide range of successful and unsuccessful prototyping case studies in order to help you Identify the core elements of an effective prototype and apply practical strategies to your own work to maximize your chance of success.

You’re not a graphic designer, and you probably won’t switch careers after this workshop.
view more…

You’re not a graphic designer, and you probably won’t switch careers after this workshop. But you make decks, resumes, and other things, and you’d love to have more basic design knowledge at your disposal when you do.

You’re not a graphic designer, but you work with them on projects, and you’d like some insight into improving your collaboration, communication, and results.

You’re not a graphic designer, but you want to learn a bit more about design history and typography, and to engage in some hands-on, analog fun.

In this workshop, we’ll take a whirlwind tour through some highlights of design history, and cover basics of typography and composition. You’ll learn important dos & don’ts, along with a few obscure facts you can use at parties.

We’ll also discuss successful design collaboration, how to most usefully evaluate design work, and how to engage in constructive critique.

As we go, we’ll engage in a series of hands-on, analog exercises to practice the above concepts and unlimber your creativity.

Day 3 – Sep 11, 2014

Afternoon
2:00 - 5:30 PM

If you want to learn how to break the wireframe cycle and improve your design work, join us as we dive into why and when you should incorporate more pen sketching into your design process.
view more…

If you want to learn how to break the wireframe cycle and improve your design work, join us as we dive into why and when you should incorporate more pen sketching into your design process. You’ll also learn why and how to break down silos that often exist between website content owners, designers, engineers and business stakeholders and take home 9 practical tips you can apply to your work the next day. This unique format of presentations and a hands-on Design Studio workshop will be co-run by two web pros from 29th Drive: Kevin Goldman, Chief Design Architect and Jen Walsh, Senior UX Designer.

We'll touch on each of the following:

Honest design vs decoration

Why sketching is important to the design process

Tips & tricks to get you started with pen sketching

How to easily and effectively sketch remotely with team members, customers, and peers

In this hands-on workshop, we’ll discuss insights and techniques for building a nimble, effective and user-centred product team—a team that designs and builds great products for a global audience.
view more…

In this hands-on workshop, we’ll discuss insights and techniques for building a nimble, effective and user-centred product team—a team that designs and builds great products for a global audience. We’ll take you behind the scenes at Optimal Workshop to discuss what a Minimal Viable Product really is, and—the hard part—what to do once you’ve got one.

I’ll take you through our design and development process and how we ensure that our Better Experience Bureau is an integral part of this process. We’ll discuss the importance of design in every aspect of the work you do, and how the subtleties of user experience can make or break a business from the inside or out.

We’ve pulled together concepts from the Lean Startup movement, Agile UX, and waterfall methodologies to give you a grab-bag of tools to take with you back to your teams. And we’ll give you some tips on how to communicate your ideas clearly.

When we say ‘hands-on’, we mean it. You’ll get time to brainstorm and discuss how these insights could help you achieve your own particular goals, and solve your own unique challenges. And we'll encourage everyone to share their own insights as well.

Most UX designers use a combination of data and expertise to create their designs but don’t explicitly tie their design decisions to the evidence that created them.
view more…

Most UX designers use a combination of data and expertise to create their designs but don’t explicitly tie their design decisions to the evidence that created them. This can create a gap for stakeholders to understand the design strategy and create more churn in the design process. Instead, learn to be proactive with your design decisions and map them to quantitative and qualitative data. This workshop will teach you, through practice projects and discussion, how to articulate the “why” of your design based on objectively collected data. When you are able to reference credible data as evidence behind your design choices, the results are good for all: Better buy-in and understanding with your client, AND a stronger end product.

UX Week Ticketholder Login

Please Note:

Your Eventbrite login email address must match the email address that was entered for you (the attendee) during registration. Please Contact us if you are unable to login or for assistance or questions about selecting your workshops.